Following Praz-Dellavalade’s closure in July, Anat Ebgi is taking over the French dealers’ former Los Angeles gallery at the 6150 Wilshire Boulevard complex, inaugurating the space with a solo show by Jibade-Khalil Huffman on 28 September. Ebgi describes the move as “both an expansion and consolidation”, in which her gallery will now operate within two adjacent locations on Wilshire Boulevard, and close the East Hollywood location she opened on Fountain Avenue in 2021. She will continue to run a third space in New York, which she opened in Tribeca in April.
For many years, Ebgi says, she and her neighbouring gallerists René-Julien Praz and Bruno Delavallade shared both a courtyard and friendly rapport. After launching in Paris in 1990, Praz-Dellavalade added its Wilshire Boulevard location in 2017, where Ebgi joined in 2020. But “between Covid and the distance between Paris and Los Angeles, it became really difficult for them to come to the gallery, and we saw them less and less”, she tells The Art Newspaper. “When it became more apparent that that space was going to become available, I mentioned to the landlord that I was really excited about the idea of expanding on Wilshire.”
The Los Angeles gallerist is trading in her 2,800 sq. ft Fountain Avenue storefront for the slightly smaller, 2,500 sq. ft former Praz-Delavallade space, citing its proximity to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) and the Academy Museum as major gains. “I like accessibility, and being in a central place does help,” she says. Unlike the Wilshire complex, which has its own parking lot, she adds, Fountain Avenue only offered metered parking, an inconvenience for both visitors and employees: “We would all just get parking tickets.”
The East Hollywood location, she adds, “was always intended to be a short-term lease”, having initially opened in 2021 for a collaborative Womanhouse exhibition with the non-profit Los Angeles Nomadic Division. “We benefited in many ways operating in locations across the city, being able to reach different audiences,” she adds, but the continued operation of the Fountain Avenue space required a day-to-day shuffling of her employees across town. Reversing the recent trend of galleries opening additional spaces across Los Angeles, she looks forward to concentrating her staff of ten in one place and lessening confusion for visitors. “People would come to Wilshire thinking they were seeing the Fountain show, where people would go to Fountain thinking they were seeing the Wilshire show,” she says.
Real estate recalibrations like these reflect the evolution of Los Angeles’s art world landscape in response to both internal and external forces. Citing both health issues and the rising costs of operating a gallery, Praz-Dellavalade closed amid an ongoing market correction and wave of gallery closures. Throughout Los Angeles, other galleries have quietly closed the additional locations they opened during the market boom of the pandemic years, including M+B, Nonaka-Hill and François Ghebaly.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Monodrama (still), 2024 Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles and New York
After more than a decade in Culver City—once the commercial centre of the Los Angeles art world, now home to companies including Amazon and TikTok—Ebgi also closed her space on La Cienega Boulevard late last year. “The centre of gravity in LA is always shifting; it’s one of the defining characteristics of the city,” she says. “Our reason for leaving La Cienega was simply that after 11 years we outgrew it. Every artist had multiple shows there; we had done everything we could possibly do in the space.”
The Wilshire complex, a two-storey building from the 1930s, has historic roots in the Los Angeles art scene. Its prior tenants include galleries Mark Foxx, Acme and Roberts & Tilton Gallery, and currently includes the conceptually-inclined space 1301 PE. Ahead of an interior renovation, Ebgi has handed Jibade-Khalil Huffman carte blanche with the new space, “where he can go in and really be more experimental and create a more experiential exhibition”, she says. The multimedia installation artist plans to use the gallery as his studio leading up to his show, Control(28 September-16 November), which will include a new suite of short videos projected through holes in the gallery walls.
Afterwards, working with Los Angeles architects Woods + Dangaran, Ebgi plans on streamlining the gallery’s interiors as well as amplifying its exterior. “They are helping us with ideas about how to activate the façade of the building in terms of making our presence on Wilshire more declarative,” she says. “But what I’m really hoping is that you’ll come in and find a completely new space.”